Tortilla Flat (1935) is an early John Steinbeck's novel set in Monterey, California.
The book portrays with great sympathy and humour a group of paisanos (fellows/countrymen), denouncing society by enjoying life and wine in the idyllic days just before U.S. prohibition.
Tortilla Flat was made into a film in 1942. Steinbeck would later return to the some of the panhandling locals of Monterey (though not the Spanish paisanos of the Flat) in his novel Cannery Row (1945).
John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968) was unarguably one of the best American writers of the 20th century. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, he is best known for his novella “Of Mice and Men” (1937) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939), both of which examine the lives of the working class and the migrant worker during the Great Depression. Steinbeck wrote in the naturalist style, portraying people as the center of his stories. His characters and his stories were taken from real life struggles in the first half of the 20th century. His body of work reflects his wide range of interests, including marine biology, jazz, politics, philosophy, history, and myth. Seventeen of his works, including “Cannery Row” and “The Pearl”, went on to become Hollywood films, and Steinbeck himself succeeded as a Hollywood writer, garnering an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing for Alfred Hitchcock's “Lifeboat”, in 1945. Steinbeck is also known as a regionalist, naturalist, mystic, proletarian writer, moved to anger by the brutality of the Depression.
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